Posts Tagged ‘repair’

Adding Elastic to Shoes & Anemonies

Monday, April 25th, 2011

These shoes used to constantly frustrate Rebecca, they had straps with velcro across the top, and whenever she walked normally the velcro would pop open, so she’d walk like a duck, really slowly, whenever she wore them. Great! No, not great.

So I undid all the stitching on the straps and velcro and cut them off the shoe. Then I cut some short lengths of cupcake ribbon and some wide elastic, wrapped the cupcake ribbon around the ends of the elastic and sewed around all four edges of the cupcake to secure the elastic. The cupcake ribbon gives it a nice finished look, and, most importantly, now Rebecca can happily run in them!

We went on a mom-field trip to the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve on the coast just north of Half Moon Bay. It was cool! There are tons of tide pools, a creek, boulders, anemones, starfish large beds of mussels and a bazillion hermit crabs and marine plants. I’d like to go again. I don’t think I’d ever seen anemones in the ‘wild’ like this before.

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Cleaning the Project Backlog

Monday, August 10th, 2009

I’ve been trying to clean things up in our work and play space, call it nesting if you want, and for me that usually means finishing or discarding or, ahem, hiding, unfinished projects. Finishing is usually the most satisfactory, but of course it takes the most time. The particular table I was cleaning off yesterday had several clothing repair or alteration projects on it, most went in the discard pile, because they were for Rebecca, and thus since I’d put them off for a year, I could just pack them up in the too-small-box. They primarily needed to be altered for head size, since she had an enormous head, but who knows what the next baby will need. Probably the same thing, but I’m going to cross them off the list for now.

Adding elastic to pants

I just added these pants this morning though, so I got them done. They had a stiff corduroy draw string, which caused panic and unhappiness when Rebecca tried to use the bathroom herself. Obviously an untenable state of affairs, I don’t like clothes with buttons or snaps in the back either, kids should be able to reach everything themselves, and fasten everything themselves. But I liked the pants. So rather than chucking them into the donation bag I pulled out the drawstring and added some elastic. Now they are much more functional, although I should probably do something about the ankle ties too.

Produce Bags

Also in my project pile was all of the materials and a sketched paper pattern to make these produce bags. (The design is heavily borrowed from Linen, Wool, Cotton although I didn’t actually use their pattern.) I wanted to make more, but I’m going to put the rest of the fabric back away and see how these hold up, I doubled the loose weave fabric, but I’m worried it’s going to fall apart. It’s really suited more for curtains, which is what I bought it for ten years ago, rather than being a workhorse. It’s just loose woven cotton, not an actual net fabric. I really like how it wrinkled and shrank up when I washed it though, I should have taken another picture. They survived one trip to WholeFoods today, and if I never try to put an artichoke or oranges with stems into them they might last…

And that table is mostly unburied now, hurray! There are just a lot of whole and partial thrifted clothes that I need to fold into my fabric stash, and a couple things I haven’t figured out what to do with. I really should have taken a before and after picture!

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Resurrecting Sheep

Monday, August 3rd, 2009

Many years ago, somewhere upwards of twenty I guess, my grandmother Alison made me a sheep. Or at least I took one of her sheep home with me after visiting, I seem to recall that she had made a whole pile of them. It’s a big pillow sized sheep, good for leaning against, perhaps too thick for sleeping on. (She also made me a six foot tall floppy bunny named Harvey, she could certainly work big when she wanted.) The intervening twenty years have not been kind to it though, and when I got my old stuffed animals out of storage because my daughter wanted a sheep, it was falling apart.

Somewhere along the line it lost its ears, the eyes had been replaced, and I seem to have added an extra nose button, when it had a perfectly good seam nose. Worse than that, all the seams had rotted since it went into storage. All the seams going through the fake fur anyway, which is all of them except the bottoms of the feet and the face seams. (I think it probably had something to do with the nasty gluey substance backing the knit fur fabric.)

disemboweled

When I first got it out I thought I was only going to have to fix a few seams, but after going through the wash (in a pillow case), with the split seams basted together, it became apparent I was going to have to rip the whole thing apart and re-sew it. Which, frankly, might have been easier than repairing the seams anyway, because I could just turn it inside out and sew it back together on the machine.

Which I did eventually after hand sewing the leg seams back together. I was trying to maintain the delusion that I could get away with fixing only some of the seams, but sewing that fake fur by hand was not much fun, and the whole sheep was coming to bits. Eventually I accepted that if I was giving a toy to a three year old I needed to really fix it, because sturdy is a requirement for stuffed friends.

I made new ears out of a pair of socks from the rag bag, I think they are very stylish! And once the whole sheepy was back together I decided it needed an extra something for the horrors it had been through, and I crocheted a flower chain for its neck. I can’t do a lot about the abraded face, but sheepy is now a functional pillowy friend again.

Sheepy

(Rebecca *wanted* to be in that picture, I have no idea what is up with her expression!)

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Patching a Straw Hat

Thursday, June 11th, 2009

patched hatThis straw hat has blown off my head a few too many times, and there were large holes and cracks developing in the brim. But no more! Now it is cute. Or, it is at least me, eclectic! And I don’t need to spend the money on a new hat. More importantly to me, really, I don’t have to throw this hat away. I hate hate hate throwing things away.

If your style is eclectic, then patching a straw hat with cloth is easy peasy. Just slap some patches of fabric down and run your sewing machine backwards and forwards at 3/8″ intervals, or whatever suits your hat. (Backwards because you probably can’t get the crown of the hat through your sewing machine’s throat.) The most important detail is that you don’t want to chew the straw up more than you have to, so set a good long stitch length. If you use a really tiny stitch you will be essentially perforating the page, and your hat will probably crack along the stitch lines. Counter productive. Your hat probably already has a stitched edge on the brim, I guess that’s the cheap way to make straw hats, mine looks like it was stitched at about 4 stitches to the inch. My darned patches vary from 4 to 8 stitches per inch, I’m betting the longer stitch lengths will hold up better, but I just started figuring all this out, so we’ll see.

darn

You could get fancy and turn the edges under, I would do that before darning the patch down to avoid unnecessary stitching on the straw, but I just left the edges raw. They’re random patches from my scrap bag, I think they would look silly if I got too fussy about it.

If you have a really bad hole you can darn it every which way to hold everything together. This hole under the brim was the one that finally drove me to sewing my hat. About 8 inches of the brim was about to fall off.

hole

But now I have a happy hat again! In time for my two week Maine Island Vacation. We leave Saturday! Hurray! So things may be quiet around here for a while. (Does this count as a tutorial?)

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